Dr. Zixiang Xiong, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, won a top 10 percent paper award at the 17th annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) Workshop in Xiamen, China.

Xiong and his former visiting student Zengqiang Yan, along with Yan’s Ph.D. advisor in China, Li Yu, won for their paper “Texture-free large-area depth recovery for planar surfaces.”

Their paper describes a texture-free depth enhancement method for large areas of missing depth information. The method has wide applications in 3-D TV, gaming, objection segmentation and pattern recognition.

Xiong, an IEEE Fellow, joined the department in 1999. His research focuses on information signal processing over networks. Other honors he has received include the TEES Fellow Award; the TEES Select Young Faculty Award; the Young Investigator Awards from the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army Research Office; and the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. MMSP 2015 is the 17th International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing. The workshop is organized by the Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

This year’s event had a Heterogeneous Big Data Analytics in Multimedia theme. The workshop brings together researchers and developers in multimedia signal processing and applications to share their latest achievements and explore future directions and synergies in these exciting areas.

Dr. S.P. Bhattacharyya, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was named a Foreign Member of the Academia Nacional de Engenharia (ANE), Brazil, at the Academy’s annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro.
Professor Pedro M.G. Ferreira, chairman of the nominating committee at the Academy, commended Bhattacharyya for his research career and relationship with Brazilian universities.

“Bhattacharyya is recognized for his outstanding contributions to control theory and for his establishment of the first graduate program in Control Systems in Brazil in the 1970’s,” Ferreira said. “Some of his former students and graduates of this program are members of the Academy.

“He is also being recognized for his current ongoing research work in collaboration with researchers at the best Brazilian Universities and for promoting Brazil in the United States through study abroad programs based at Texas A&M University and conducted in Brazil over the last 10 years. The Academy is honored to welcome Bhattacharyya as one of two Foreign Members elected this year.”

“Dr. Bhattacharya is internationally known for his contributions to the field of control theory and I am proud that he is our colleague,” said Dr. N.K. Anand, executive associate dean and associate director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station.

“I am grateful for this spontaneous recognition from the ANE in Brazil for work I did there 40 years ago, Bhattacharyya said. “It further strengthens my relationship with this country which I love.”

Bhattacharyya obtained his B.Tech degree from IIT Bombay in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1971. He joined Texas A&M in 1980 and currently holds the Robert M. Kennedy Professorship I. He has coauthored eight books and nearly 300 papers in the field of Control Systems, was elected IEEE Fellow in 1989, an IFAC Fellow in 2011 and was named a Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2012.

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